


Trust Fall

by Moxibustion (RyuuzaKochou)



Series: Robin, Flamebird & Sparrow [4]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Building Collapse, Cassandra Cain Needs a Hug, Confident Tim Drake, Day Four: Running Out Of Time, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Jason Todd is So Done, Medical Procedures, Tim Drake Has a Plan, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26812219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyuuzaKochou/pseuds/Moxibustion
Summary: The three start building a foundation.... while standing on some shaky ground, literally.With Flamebird's life on the line, Robin is forced to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, Sparrow knows what he's doing.
Relationships: Cassandra Cain & Tim Drake, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Series: Robin, Flamebird & Sparrow [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947262
Comments: 10
Kudos: 238





	Trust Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Whumptober Day Five: Building Collapse
> 
> Disclaimer: Medical procedures depicted are extremely hand wavy. The technology depicted is, surprisingly, all real.
> 
> I didn't like doing something so long, but it was good to dig a little deeper into Jason & Cass' history with one another.

Robin gritted his teeth against the urge to cough and never stop, hands pulling at whatever small chunks of rubble would deign to move. Sweat painted grimy rivers down his face and arms. He was scraped and bruised, and pissed as hell.

“Hang on, Flamebird! I’m coming!”

_Fuck_. He grabbed at a larger chunk and hauled with sheer brute strength and stubbornness. His anger boiled under his skin, but anger was the fuel of his hyperspace engine. Anger powered him through almost every obstacle and enemy he’d ever faced in the past. He saw no reason to let it stop now, even when the floor beneath him was soaked in ominous, seething grey groaning sounds, contrasted with the sharp, bright green clinks of concrete falling on concrete and the blue sizzle of old, rusted steel. He couldn’t see much daylight - or, given the time, moonlight - from where he stood, even with the great, gaping hole in the roof above him. He had a field-issue Bat Light which gave him light to see by, more than enough to see how bad his situation was.

“Just like old times, eh?” Robin tried to inject some cheer into his voice as he worked desperately to clear a path over the pile of rubble and to the other side where he thought Flamebird was. He didn’t know for sure; she hadn’t answered him. “Seriously, just another day’s training with Shiva and that other asshole, whatever his fucking name was.”

He yanked another slab of drywall and rotting wood out of the pile, throwing it down into the void behind him. “I won’t upset you by saying the asshole’s name, ‘kay? Let’s face it, neither of us lucked out when it came to fathers. You an’ your asshole, trainin’ you up to be something you weren’t ever gonna be, or even wanted to be.” Robin pulled down part of the pile, letting it slither into the void. “And me and my asshole, the child-selling drunkass bastard. Oh, you need a body to act as your protege’s training dummy?” Robin mimicked sarcastically. “Well guess what, this kid, my own flesh an’ blood, _doesn’t feel pain_. Boy for sale, latest model, going cheap, cheap, cheap! How much? I’ll take all offers as long as it includes a bottle of fucking Jack. Oh, you’re assassins? Should I give a flying fuck about that and all the damage you’ll probably inflict on him? Nah,” Robin lets the steam rise off his rage, powering him through another heavy chunk of masonry. He fingered his comm for the look of the thing, but the damn transmitter was still busted.

“It was worth it, though,” Robin was forced to stop and breathe for a second. “It was all worth it, ‘cause at least I got to meet you. I guess my old man was fucking good for something. I never told B this, you know. Well, obviously, I never told him nothing about all the ‘special training’ I got and shit, but I also never told him ‘bout my Dad. I wonder what he’d say if he knew when I heard Two-Face had done the world a fucking favour, the only impulse I had to control was to not go up there and shake his fucking hand?”

He couldn’t. He could _never_ tell B where he got his ‘fighter’s instincts’ and ‘combat savantism’. Batman thought he had a natural talent. Honestly, he probably did, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been honed to a razor before Batman had ever ran into an exhausted, starving street kid in the Alley one fateful night, three years ago. To this day, Robin wasn’t really sure if Batman was really sold on Robin just being a straight-up punching prodigy. Sometimes Robin would catch him watching with that Detective look on his face. He knew Batman had questions that he’d always avoided asking outright. 

Robin clambered up and tried to shimmy his way through the hole he’d just made, light in hand. _Fuck_ , it was still too narrow. Stupid fucking puberty and to hell with the lofty Todd build as well. Figures the Old Asshole was still making his life difficult from beyond the grave. “Come on Flame, talk to me. Give me some kind of sign you’re okay! It’s me! You know it’s safe to tell me!” That was one of the reasons they were so close. For a long time, for an eternity of pain and hardship and scars, their only safe place had been with each other.

Tap, ta-ta-tap-tap. TAP-TAP.

Robin burst out laughing. “Shave and haircut? Really?” He tried to sound annoyed, but there was no room for any emotion but relief. Those bright purple knocks were the first good news he’d had in a while. “Are you hurt?”

He waited. While he grudgingly admitted Flamebird had blossomed under Nightwing’s care, overcoming the aphasia induced by her shithole father was a long, hard road, filled to the brim with missteps. She still, to this day, retreated to silence when feeling the least bit threatened or unsafe, even if it wasn’t in her best interests to do so. Robin couldn’t blame her. They’d been raised together, practically. He knew where it all came from. He knew how deep that silence and fear of vulnerability had been beaten into her.

Suddenly, there were three quick taps. Neither a yes or a no. _Maybe_.

“Are you trapped?”

Tap. _Yes_.

Damn. “Can you move at all?”

Tap-tap. _No._

Double damn. “Hang on, I’m coming,” he promised her. He surveyed the surroundings grimly. The floor was still groaning and clearly unstable. There was a void behind him where part of the floor had collapsed all the way into the basement, and the rubble that had once been the ceiling and upper floors before it had collapsed downwards onto them. There was a thin piece of still-attached floor that he could walk along and get to a more stable area of the turn-of-the- century building. He could go out there and get to what was left of the roof and maybe send up a flare. He could get help.

But he sure as fuck wasn’t going to. _Cass_ was trapped back there. He wasn’t going to leave her.

“Stupid, asshole drug runners,” he muttered bitterly. Picking a half-rotted, dilapidated boarding house as your meth kitchen had been an accident just waiting to happen. The worst part was Robin and Flamebird hadn’t even been looking for any crooks tonight; the building had just been a quiet area in the Old Gotham they had chosen to meet up at, where they were unlikely to be spotted. Neither Batman nor Nightwing knew Robin and Flamebird had a history. They weren’t _going to_ either. “Fucking idiots. I think they blew the lab because they saw us on the roof, Flame. Your brain on meth, huh? What a fucking delight.”

A soft, leaf green scrape. Half a sigh. Half a laugh. Robin grinned. “Yeah, I think so too.”

They’d never had any problems understanding one another.

Robin’s next try in shifting more debris caused the humour they’d tried to pad the situation with to get stripped away in a heartbeat. He yanked out a chunk that was just like any other chunk, felt the grating grey-green scrape of objects grinding against one another as the whole pile shifted. Panic rushed through him as it slid in the _wrong direction_ , towards where Flamebird was buried. “Flamebird!” Robin shouted as he futilely tried to haul back some of the shifting mass. “ _Cass!_ ”

Silence. Then a round of coughing from the other side. _Tap ta-ta-tap-tap. TAP-TAP._

_I’m okay_.

“Holy shit!” Robin said weakly, when he could breathe and think past the white out of panic. “Fuck this hellhole!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Fuck those drug-cooking, methed-up assholes, fuck this stupid, rotten, shithole of a city and _fuck this fucking unfunny game of fucking Jenga!_ ”

“... Robin?”

“WHAT?!” Robin spun around angrily and nearly fell back.

Sparrow nearly jumped back and dropped into oblivion down three stories to the basement. He was standing right on the edge of the hole in the floor.

“What the… Sparrow?” Robin gaped. “What the fuck are you even doing here?” The kid must have tightrope walked his way across the narrow strip connecting the floor to the walls.

“It’s an emergency,” Sparrow pointed out. “That’s kinda my thing. An exploding building is something people talk about online, even in Gotham. I heard about it so I… came.”

Robin’s eyes narrowed. Sparrow's tone was very tentative. Placating, almost. Like how Mom’s got whenever Willis was home. Robin realised he was sort of looming over the kid. He sucked back his rage and tried to relax his stance to something not quite so much on the bloodthirsty end of the spectrum. “What the fuck took you so long?” he growled without actually meaning to. Okay, so sometimes his rage didn’t respond to the brakes very fast, he admitted it.

“I’m sorry,” Sparrow mumbled. “It took me a while to get my Collapsed Building Kit over here.”

Robin blinked. That was sufficiently unexpected to snap him out of his berserker state. “Your what now?”

He took in all of Sparrow, rather than just the glancing threat-level assessment he automatically did with everyone. The kid was hauling a ton of equipment on his back. Some sort of square frame thing, a long air tank strapped on top of that, coils of ropes drooping from his belt as well as what looked like round pieces of tarp. Somewhere in all that mess was the kid’s usual backpack field medical kit. Small wonder the floor groaned even more dramatically every time he moved.

“I have equipment sets specific to certain disasters,” Sparrow shrugged uncomfortably in the face of Robin’s glare. “Flood Kit, Fire Kit, Storm Kit, Terrorist Attack Kit, Rogue Attack Kit - those are _different_ , believe me - Alien Invasion Kit…”

“You’re shittin’ me!”

“In Gotham?” Sparrow raised an eyebrow under his cowl. “I have three different ones, covering a multitude of scenarios.”

Okay, Robin had to admit that it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Gotham had a certain way of driving the average statistician straight to Arkham. He shook himself. _Cass_. “Flamebird’s behind there,” he pointed to the rubble. “Come help me shift it.”

“First things, first,” Sparrow shed a bunch of the equipment off his back. The air tank was wedged as securely as possible against the pile of rubble. The coiled rope and what looked like pulley and tackle setups, were carefully placed next to it. The square thing, which Robin realized was a folded-up stretcher, was leaned carefully near the hole. “I’m going to go check on her.” Then he nimbly clambered up the rubble piles and neatly shimmied through the hole Robin had dug, leaving Robin in the dust.

“Hey, Flamebird, remember me?” Sparrow’s soft voice, all red tones and electronic blue buzzes from the voice modulator. “I’m just going to put some of these sticky things on you, okay, so I can check your vitals. Do you understand?” Silence. “No, don’t move your head. Can you give a verbal response?”

“She won’t talk,” Robin called over. “She… she has trouble with words. She won’t talk if she’s in pain. Just… it’s one tap for yes, two for no”

“Oh…. okay,” Sparrow accepted this. “So, do you understand, Flamebird?

_Tap._

Sparrow went through a barrage of medical questions, pain scales and other things while Robin fretted impatiently behind the wall of rubble, gritting his teeth as the groaning noises steadily went darker shades of grey.

“Okay, I’m just going to put this c-collar on you. It might not feel very nice, but it’s just to stabilise your spine, just in case. These foam blocks are going to go either side of your head. The little cut-out bits are there so you can still hear. Tap hard if anything starts to hurt.”

Robin seethed and fretted as a small eternity passed with Sparrow not speaking at all and Flamebird not tapping either. There were some orange-yellow scraping noises, some blue-white beeps, the green sounds of parting Velcro and some red clicking noises. Occasionally lights would flicker through the hole. 

Sparrow eventually slithered back out of the hole. “Okay, so, she’s pinned by her left leg. The rest of her limbs are intact and functioning, and her spine and neck don’t seem to have any damage but I’ve immobilised her just in case. The good news is, her leg isn’t crushed and it _probably_ isn’t broken, though it might be cracked and will definitely be bruised. The bad news is it’s extremely swollen, so I’m pretty sure she has compartment syndrome, which means the swelling is cutting off circulation and might damage the leg too much for repair if we can’t get the rubble off immediately.

“I’m going to hook up the tank to my air lines and take them through to the other side, along with the stretcher. I need you to take the ropes, get onto the roof and secure the block and pulley to the safe, stable end of the roof. I’ll get her onto the stretcher as much as I can, and then I’ll use the air-lifting bags,” - Sparrow tugged at the round bits of canvas dangling from his belt - “to lift the rubble off the leg and topple it off into the hole there,” Sparrow pointed. “Then I’ll strap her to the stretcher and get an air cast onto the leg and you can haul us up to the roof with the block and pulley. I might have to give her some incisions to relieve the pressure, but let’s worry about that after we get her out. You got all that?”

Robin gaped. “What the… where the fuck did all that come from? Suddenly you’re the world's shortest MD?”

Sparrow’s lips thinned. “Look, I know you think I’m just some obsessed Bat-fan and stuff, but I’ve spent years studying this. I’ve spent years _training_. I just spent the last ten minutes studying the blueprints of this place,” he waved a cellphone, showing them. “And surveying the wounded leg and the rubble pile with a flexiscope camera. I know what compartment syndrome looks like. I know what _shock_ looks like. Moreover, I know we’re currently standing in a cantilever void collapse. You know what that means, bright boy? It means the floor we’re standing on is no longer anchored at _either end_ . We’re essentially standing on a seesaw that’s about to fall to bits around us, and when _that_ happens? Assuming we even survive the drop to the basement, the odds of the big heavy stone walls collapsing _inward_ and turning us into a fine meat paste are _exceptionally high_. We are, in short, on a ticking clock. Flamebird is on a _shorter one_. Now, do you want to stand here and question my credentials a bit more, or do you want to come up with a better idea OR do you want to get up on the roof and secure the ropes so we can all get out of here?”

Robin’s mouth opened and shut a few times from the deluge of furious words. Sparrow had been sassy in the past, but he’d never been scathing like he was now. 

“Tick tock, Robin,” Sparrow added irritably, tapping his foot. “We only have time for one out of the three.”

Robin was taken aback. It was an experience, being talked down to by a kid half your size and a quarter of your weight. His sudden assertiveness was weirdly annoying after all the scrapes the kid had gotten them into before. Part of Robin wanted to make the kid back down, to answer the challenge physically. He opened his mouth...

_Tap ta-ta-tap-tap. TAP. TAP._

… and felt a sudden sense of shame wash over him. He was mad at himself, and his own feelings of helplessness. He was mad about the fact that he wasn’t protecting Cass, the one he’d spent years before this trying to protect.

He was using the kid as a scapegoat for his feelings. Figures that even now Cass was the one helping him to understand himself, just like she always did.

Robin wordlessly grabbed the ropes and unhooked his grapple gun to go and gain some altitude. Even as the usual blue starburst and green whine of the grapple gun finding purchase and unwinding happened, the red and blue toned voice behind him made him hesitate.

“I know what I’m doing, you know.” Sparrow's voice was a sad, disheartened mumble. He’d clearly misinterpreted Robin’s silence.

Robin turned back to correct him, to tell him he wasn’t doing this grudgingly, that Robin _agreed_ with him, but the kid had already scurried back though the hole. He sighed. When Robin had to make amends, he made them through actions. The instinct to apologise with words repulsed him. He’d had to give apologies to plenty of assholes who hadn’t earned one. _Sorry you lost your job, Daddy; I’m sorry you had a bad day; I’m sorry I couldn’t hit my targets; I’m sorry the sound of gunfire scares me, Master; I’m sorry; I’m sorry; I’m sorry._ The words had been one more way for a parade of abusive motherfuckers to remind him he was powerless. 

He really was sorry for doubting Sparrow, for his ill-thought and flippant dismissal. By grabbing the ropes, he was admitting that he knew he was in the wrong. He knew that his intentions sometimes got lost in translation though. 

There wasn’t time for this anyway. He got to work.

He did feel the sting of shame again, though, when Sparrow’s plan went off without a hitch. The stretcher slid under Flamebird neatly, the ropes were attached to it, the airbags slid into place and inflated with a blast of air from the tank. The rubble shifted off of Flamebird’s leg and Robin was almost delighted to hear the white-edged cream of Flamebird’s sucked in breath as the weight lifted off. The rubble pile didn’t slide off into the void below them as expected, but Sparrow probably even had a plan for that. There must have been some other equipment he had with him, because there was a white, high pitched whine and a deep maroon grunt from Sparrow before the stubborn pile finally shifted, toppling into the void, but worryingly taking some of the floor with it.

“Flamebird!” Robin cried in relief when he finally had eyes on her. Her face was blank and tight around the edges strapped between two foam blocks, but he could see from the tiny, upturned corners of her eyes that she was happy to finally see him too. “Honestly, can’t you go five second without having a building dropped on you or something?”

Flamebird rapped him on the forehead, chastising him. 

“Here,” Sparrow was all business. “Help me slide the stretcher all the way under and then start strapping her in. I,” Sparrow looked at the leg and grimaced. It was clearly swollen under the Flamebird suit. “I’m going to have to cut this, sorry.”

While Robin got to work securing Flamebird to the stretcher, Sparrow whipped out a wicked-looking set of shears that must have been designed to cut through armour because they split the leg of Flamebird’s uniform like a knife through butter. Robin had to concede the Sparrow had put a lot of thought into his field equipment. 

The leg was… wow, all red and purples, distended and grotesque. Flamebird’s expression didn’t show she was in pain, but Robin could tell by her breathing that she was.

“Definitely compartment syndrome,” Sparrow said grimly.

“Jesus,” Robin breathed. “You can fix that, right?” Cass’s leg barely looked like a _leg_. She loved to dance. How would she dance if she lost a leg?

“I can,” Sparrow nodded. “Or, I can treat it, at least. But we shouldn’t do it here in all the dust. It’s bad enough we’re all covered in it and breathing it in. You need to get on the pulley so you can haul her up through the roof.” The floor groaned again. “Preferably quickly.”

Finally given something tangible to, rather than wait around, Robin didn’t have it in him to be slow. “Be right back,” he gave Flamebird a look, a promise. She nodded.

Robin was up on the sagging roof in a trice. He had to anchor the block a fair way from the roof hole, because there just wasn’t anywhere closer that was still stable. It would mean he wouldn’t be able to see Flamebird as she came up until she was nearly out entirely, but Robin had come up with a way around that. He’d attached the other end of the line to a chunk of rubble he’d managed to snag from up top. It wasn’t quite as heavy as Flamebird, but it would make a good counterweight. He laboriously dragged it to the edge of the hole. “Ready?”

“Ready!” Sparrow yelled back. He was holding the grapple line. 

Flamebird gave a shaky thumbs-up.

Robin carefully toppled the stone chunk over the lip of the hole, careful to keep control of it so Flamebird didn’t suddenly shoot upwards. He also made sure to angle it so she didn’t inadvertently get a rock dropped on her. He payed out the line with care, the strain was an opaque orange on his hands, shoulders and braced knees. With Sparrow keeping the guideline taut, Flamebird rose slowly and safely.

It was all going so well. 

Then the building gave one massive, grey-blue groan, shuddering like an animal, as more of the rooftop sagged inwards.

“Fuck!” Robin cursed as he toppled forward. He was still on the roof but it was tilted badly. The counterweight was swinging wildly, a wrecking ball out of control, right around where Flamebird lay strapped and helpless.

Worse still, as Sparrow tried frantically to pull her out of the range of the swinging chunk, the floor started to give way under his feet. As he tried to correct, the line lost all tension.

There were now two objects swinging around each other. Only _one_ of them could bleed.

“Motherfucker!” Robin cursed, straining to keep the rock’s elevation away from Flamebird. “If I grab my knife to cut the weight line, it’ll drop on her!”

“The roof is going to go! Do it!” Sparrow yelled. “I’ll protect her!”

Robin would have loved to ask just how the fuck Sparrow was planning on doing that from where he was on a collapsing floor, but there was just no time. Screaming, he wrenched the swing of the rock as far away from the helpless Flamebird as he could manage, and then had to let the counterweight line go with one hand while he started to yank out his knife. He _couldn’t_ release the line holding Cass, or she would drop.

He was momentarily distracted by the a white whining sound starbursting up from below. He was then even more distracted by the spectacle of Sparrow leaping into the air and managing to grab one end of the stretcher.

That had to be at least ten feet straight up. Holy shit, was that how he did it? How he moved around up and down and on top of buildings? Were those stupid knee brace things on his armour not just for the aesthetics?

The roof groaned again, so Robin stuck that firmly in the ‘later’ pile and finished yankingout his knife. Sparrow desperately spun the stretcher from beneath as the counterweight swung towards it. He managed to get Flamebird out of the path of it, but didn’t quite manage to get himself out of the way too. There was a crunch and a groan as he took a blow to the face, while swinging past the unforgiving chunk of rubble.

Robin slashed the line. The counterweight dropped away into the dark. Now, it was just a matter of bracing his feet and using the weight of the stretcher line to help pull himself back up to somewhere slightly more stable, where he could then, finally, get Flamebird and Sparrow to the surface. Where he had once cursed the doughty Todd physique, now he blessed it. He was strong enough to get them to safety with his own two hands.

Flamebird had, at some point in the proceedings, passed out. Sparrow came up looking like a horror movie, nose askew and trailing sticky red strings down his face. 

“”I’m ogay,” Sparrow assured him nasally. “Jus’ helb me ged her seddled.”

Robin obligingly helped carry Flamebird’s stretcher to the nearest, stable roof. But that was the end of his usefulness, besides holding an umbrella (yes, Sparrow actually carried one) and a flashlight while Sparrow checked over Flamebird, an adhesive bandage stuck hilariously over his nose. 

“Vidals are stable,” Sparrow muttered, yanking out what looked like a smart phone to Robin, showing diagnostic information. He calmly wrapped Flamebird’s arm in a pressure cuff, plugged it into the phone and watched it compress. “Prezthure is good.”

He then took out what looked like a bulky visor or safety glasses. “Turd off th’ light.”

Robin did. “What is that thing you’re wearing? She’s going to be okay, right?”

“Hgn,” Sparrow grunted, looking closely at the leg. The weird light coming from the glasses made Cass’s skin glow green, her veins dark, swollen rivers cutting through. “She’ll be ogay,” Sparrow assured him. “Dese are ulthrasound glasses. I’m justh making sthure I can cut safely.”

Then he yanked off the visor, and broke out his field kit. Pressure bandages were prepared. Skin was swabbed with disinfectant. Numbing gel was applied. A razor-sharp scalpel was extracted from its sterile container. 

Robin jammed the light where it could still be of use and grabbed Flamebird’s hand, bending over near her face, hoping the drumming of the rain on their shelter would cover the sound of him talking. “ _Fantasia_ ,” he whispered to Cass. That was one of their code words from way back. It meant _don’t fight_.

Robin had no doubt whatsoever that Flamebird’s training and vicious reflexes would kick in the minute she felt the knife. The instinct to protect herself was so etched in she’d move without even being fully conscious. If that happened, Sparrow would be looking at far worse than a broken nose.

As Sparrow carefully started making incisions in the grotesquely swollen limb, Robin saw the moment Flamebird’s eyelids flickered, her fingers twitching. Her fight instincts were hair trigger on a good day. 

“ _Fantasia_ ,” Jason repeated gently. “ _Fox and Hound._ ”

_Don’t fight. Jason’s here._

Cass relaxed.

Robin’s eyes flickered to Sparrow and he wished they hadn’t. The flesh on Flamebird’s leg was peeled back to a wide, ugly gaping chasm and clamped there, and the second layer, the muscle, was being parted as well, all the way down the side of her calf. Sparrow was packing it in gauze as he went, an ice-cold professional despite the wheezy breathing. There was a lot of blood and squick to contend with.

“Dere,” Sparrow announced finally. “All done. The sbelling had to go down bevore it can be sutured,” he sniffled.

He hastily detached the vital sign monitor and held it out to Robin, who blinked.

“We cad’t sthrether her out ov here wib jus’ us,” Sparrow explained. “Call Badman”

Robin sighed. He had the excuse of his comms being broken before, but Sparrow was right; they could not just walk through the streets masked up and covered in grime and carting Flamebird between them. They’d need a pick up. He’d known, logically, there was absolutely no chance of Batman (or Nightwing) never finding out about this. Still, Robin expected the call to be the shitty cherry on top of the crapfest of a sundae this night had turned into.

He had just wanted to talk to his sister. Just one little conversation, to make sure she was really doing okay and that Dickface was treating her right. Was that so much to ask?

Still, Cass was here and injured, she’d lost blood and they were out in the rain. Robin would have done a lot worse than make an uncomfortable phone call to help her.

It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d feared. B just seemed surprised to be called and then relieved to know Robin and Flamebird were both, more or less, okay. He told them to stay put and he was on his way.

Robin wasn’t lulled into a false sense of security though. Hellfire and brimstone would rain down the minute Nightwing got here. He was protective of Flamebird and he hated Robin’s guts. What fun that conversation would be.

Robin was startled to feel a finger poking his cheek gently. He looked down to see a pale but awake Flamebird grinning at him. She tapped his cheek again. _Thank you_.

Jason smiled.

“Flamemird,” Sparrow leaned forward. “Cad you understand me?”

Flamebird laughed with her eyes.

“Kid, not even _I_ can understand you right now,” Robin snorted dryly. “She’s okay. Whaddya say, Flame? About a four on the pain scale?”

Flamebird held up three fingers.

“D’ree,” Sparrow nodded. “Ogay. Hag on,” he tore off his nose gauze, which was starting to leak through. “Jusb let me start a-”

Sparrow missed Robin handing the umbrella off to Flamebird, so he was unprepared when Robin grabbed either side of his face and popped his nose back into place.

Sparrow howled and clutched his face. “ARG! What did you do _that_ for?”

“You’re welcome,” Robin snorted.

“That’s _not_ the way you’re supposed to fix a broken nose!” Sparrow complained as he started packing in free flowing, bloody nose in gauze.

“Sorry, that’s the way I was taught to do it,” Robin said sheepishly. “I guess that’s why you’re the medic. I’m just Customer Relations.”

Sparrow made a face, which was kind of hilarious given that it was starting to swell up nicely. “Leave the medicine to the people with _training_ , Robin!”

“Okay,” Robin nodded. “I promise I’ll do that from now on.”

Sparrow accepted this but only grudgingly, judging by the fierce scowl on his swelling face. But he did teach Robin how to stabilize the fracture with packing and apply a nasal splint as well, and that was pretty damn cool.


End file.
